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Thursday, July 14, 2016

Fugitive Reflections

I settled into my new apartment here in the “Heart of Texas” (the town shall
remain nameless to all but those close to me) which is, from all outward
appearances, an intellectual wasteland, I began to make some observations. Trying
my best to acclimatize myself to the heat and realign my sense of direction, in
the beginning I would sit for a while on a neighbor’s steps and endeavor to
de-simmer.

The town is like Las Vegas; tawdry on one hand, without character on
the other. It shares also with Vegas the heat. However, whereas in Vegas, there
are few pleasantly cool mornings, until the heat that collects in its basin
soars dramatically as the day wears on reaching the uppermost neighborhoods,
here there are many evenings and nights when I needed to cover myself with a
blanket, it was so cold. The mornings are pleasant enough, until the heat
builds and climaxes a little past noon. And here, because the place is
relatively flat, winds blow the heat around, but not fast enough to make it
miserable. Air conditioning is an absolute necessity. It makes one wonder, as I
often did about Vegas, how people managed to live without A/C, crawling in
their wagons at oxen-speed through hostile terrain and onto Death Valley and
California beyond or ensconced in their adobe or tin roof huts cooking hot
meals under broiling sun

There is a nursing home beyond the wire fence facing my patio. I have a
magnificent view of two of its dumpsters, and a regular parade of nursing home
personnel hauling trash to those dumpsters, taking their time to have a smoke
on the way and to yak about the day’s developments inside the home. The nursing
home itself resembles a morgue or a crematorium.

For a while I would sit and stare at the pitiful sight of a dead
sparrow that had tried to fly through the fence, near the bottom. Its head and
neck drooped on the wire, and its feathers would flutter in the breeze. It
served to deepen my depression for my circumstances. I felt like I had a
personal connection with that bird.

I grew tired of seeing it. One afternoon I rose and walked over to the
fence to nudge it with my shoe so that it would drop out of sight into the
nursing home parking lot and I wouldn’t need to see it again. To my surprise,
it wasn’t a sparrow at all or any other kind of hapless bird; it was a tiny twig
with several gray-grown leaves. The discovery served to raise my spirits a
smidgen. I nudged the faux bird over the fence.

The town is not a hub of intellectual vitality. It is top-heavy with “plus
size” fat people whom I think have never cracked open a book since high school.
For all the brands of food sold in the local grocery market – a huge affair,
almost as big as the local Wal-Mart – the ones that feature “reduced fat”
advisories on their labels, the admonition doesn’t seem to sit well with so
many of the inhabitants with the mandatory calorie counts and highlighted
announcements of the twelve essentialvitamins
on packaging It’s mostly women who are balloon-size
or near clinically defined obese. And mostly they’re white.

I made another observation, that there are more “mixed couples” here
than I’ve seen anywhere else, that is, of black men with white wives or common
law wives. Or just companions. For some reason, black men almost universally
prefer plump, slobbish white women. The women have children, are homely, and there
is a dullness in their expressions that confesses a certain level of mental
inertia that could be deemed criminally stupid and obsessively short-range. I can’t explain that. I don’t think personal
esthetics has much to do with the pairings, either from the men’s standpoint or
from the distaff side. The men typically are bruisers with dreadlocks, which
may be a sign of virility in black sub-culture. Black sub-culture is so
malevolent it repels any kind of prolonged investigation, by me, at least. The
main “attraction” between them seems to be a matter of convenience. Any port in
a storm and it becomes permanent anchorage.

The drive to Texas from Virginia was incident-free. I was not in a
hurry and did not push my car to extremes. I kept a steady 60-65 mph pace and
rarely got up to 70. I just let all the highway traffic pass me. When I had the
road to myself, I would “thread the needle,” that is, feed into a curve in the
road on my left and then feed into the opposite curve on my right. I learned
that trick years ago while driving across country. The maneuver slices miles
off of one’s mileage. It has to be done when there’s no one behind one.

Truckers rule of the roads. Except when they decide to call it a day
and “coop out” in their cabs for much needed sleep. That can occur day or
night. There were countless “truckers only” spots off the highways where
perhaps a dozen rigs would be pulled up, their drivers stretched out in their
bunks, if they had one of those double-decker cabs atop the seats. I don’t know
what else the cabs are equipped with. Perhaps with fridges and water. At night,
or close to morning, one could see swarms of these behemoths grouped at the
stops, their cabs and haulage lit up like horizontal Christmas trees, looking
like snoozing creatures. The Highway Patrols of each state keep out automobile
traffic.

Truckers by and large are the safest drivers on the road. They’re more
considerate of automobile traffic than the drivers of cars are to anyone else.

I did see one major accident on the way through Arkansas. It seems that
a big rig had a passing dispute with two cars. The cars got bumped off the road
and were demolished, and I guess so were the inhabitants. The rig itself went
off the highway and landed upside down in a gully, its cargo strewn all over,
and the cab itself smashed to pieces. Ambulances, fire trucks, and two dozen
police vehicles had blocked the northbound traffic for two or more miles. That
was the only mishap I witnessed on the entire trip from Williamsburg, which
lasted about a week and a half.

It is a little-known fact that truckers did not always rule the roads.
When President Dwight E. Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway law in 1956
(it may have been in 1955), truckers in short time took away a lot of business
from the railroads, and once the interconnecting interstates had been built and
were linked up. The federal highways had to integrate with state and local
highways. Railroads had to scramble to save their business, aside from having
to kowtow to the rules and regulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Highways, said the law, had to have portions
of them long enough to accommodate landing military aircraft, at least a mile
in length. For a long time, railroads used to supply every nook and cranny in
the country with food and other necessities. But no more.

Readers may have noticed that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which
focuses on the fortunes and misfortunes of railroads under government
regulation, particularly Taggart Transcontinental, was researched and written
before Eisenhower’s stroke of a pen created the interstate system. Rand’s opus
debuted in 1957, a year after transcontinental shipping was doomed to second
class status by federal fiat.

From my perspective, the most “romantic”
places on the road are the truckers’ stops, They have names such as the Flying
J, or Love’s, TA, or Petro. This is where trucks are refueled at special pumps,
their tires re-inflated, engine repairs are made, and their haulage weighted,
as well, in anticipation of trucks having to stop at state weighing stations.
They usually feature “truckers” only lounges, bathrooms, and shower stalls. The
shops inside sell every imaginable thing one could want or need for
long-distance driving. There are restaurants and other food concessions. Some
stops promote entertainment and gaming arcades for children.

Of course, this is an
awkward time to be extolling truckers, on the occasion of the Islamic truck
massacre in Nice, France.

1 comment:

All good writers should be exiled at least once in their life. (Don't know if that's true, but it sounded appropriate under the circumstances. Hope you successfully acclimatize, or at least adjust, to more than just the heat.)

Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.